


Geständnis

by novelogical (writingmonsters)



Category: The Alienist (TV), The Alienist - Caleb Carr
Genre: Child Abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 11:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16157897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/novelogical
Summary: Missing Scene - John finds out what really happened to Laszlo's arm.





	Geständnis

He is pacing through the dust outside 808 Broadway -- needing to escape the stifling office, yearning for some sort of momentum -- nursing the stub of his cigarette, when he spots her.

“Sara!” John would know her anywhere; the purposeful stride, the cool set of her features beneath the grey boater’s hat. He meets her halfway up the street, too anxious for news to wait for her approach. She had gone to Kreizler’s house to treat with him, to make amends, to request… “Is he--? Did he say--?”

There is not an ounce of color in her round, pale face.

When Sara tips her head back to meet his gaze squarely, John is shocked by the rawness behind her eyes, the strange, glittering light of pain there. “We spoke at length,” she says and her voice is steady. “Dr. Kreizler is joining the Isaacsons at Baxter Street.”

In spite of himself, John feels his heart swell with the news. Laszlo will be all right. “He’s back on the case, then?”

“Yes.” But Sara’s pale green eyes are distant, uneasy -- focused on something beyond John, beyond Laszlo’s return to their work, something that still echoes in her marrow. “Yes, he…” Her full mouth presses itself into a tight line. Unwilling to say anything more.

“Sara?” 

John grinds out the embers of his cigarette beneath his bootheel, automatically reaching for the brushed silver case in his pocket to light another. Holding the cigarette between his teeth he offers one to Sara who obliges with a grateful look, cupping her palm around the light.

“What did he say?” John presses. 

It is several long pulls, the smoke held for a moment in her lungs and exhaled smoothly, before she speaks again. “John,” she says slowly “I don’t know that Kreizler himself realizes just how damaged he is.”

John knows. He hasn’t plumbed the depths of it -- but he has known since those early days at Harvard, since they were both so young. He has seen the cracks, badly filled in and painted over, the jagged edges of Kreizler’s facade. He knows that Laszlo is broken. Is wounded. Is terribly, dangerously vulnerable. And he has loved him through it, has stayed when all those sharp corners and bitter hurts had turned outwards, he has eased the way for Laszlo where he can. Protected him as much as he is able.

A sick and anxious feeling twists in John’s belly. “Has something else happened?”

Sara shakes her head. “He -- John you know I pushed him. The old society paper, the reference to the piano recital.” Her voice, so steady, so firm, starts to waver. “He asked us to bare ourselves, our traumas and our griefs, for him to pick over and it  _ angered  _ me.”

John is startled by the shine of tears clinging to her eyelashes. “Well, of course it should anger you, Sara,” he stammers. Casting about for a way to offer comfort, a balm for the wounds even while he wants to protect Kreizler. “As much as the man is always thinking, he can be completely thoughtless sometimes -- and I know he doesn’t intend to be cruel, but…”

“I believed that his asking us to confess these traumas and vulnerabilities to him, while revealing none of his own weaknesses was arrogance,” Sara admits. She does not look at John, watches the slow passage of hansoms and carriages along the street instead. “I mistook his reticence for a notion of invulnerability, and I found that society column -- I’m afraid as much as I resented his bullying us, I did not conduct myself much better.”

“Sara, I don’t understand.” Try as he might, he cannot piece her words together. Cannot connect Laszlo with the case with this talk of vulnerability and confessions.

Another heavy exhale of acrid smoke. “He… explained some things. I see more clearly now where his reticence came from, why this case has affected him so profoundly.”

“What…?” John, who knows Laszlo so intimately -- who had thought he knew him best -- might just take her by the shoulders and shake the revelations out of her. “What did he say?”

“I can’t.” Sara purses her lips, guilty and sad-eyed. “John, you’ll have to ask him yourself. It isn’t mine to tell. But,” she offers him a soft, consoling look. “He was more than justified in concealing the truth, John. I will tell you that. I don’t believe what he admitted to me was even half of the extent of it.”

It is a feeling John should have grown accustomed to by now, working this case. The odd-man out. Not clever enough for forensic sciences or psychology -- barely able to contribute value. And, evidently, certainly not worth the confidences passed between Laszlo and Sara to spark the good doctor’s return to their case.

_ You’ll have to ask him yourself. _

There is no chance.

He almost asks, fidgeting on the edge of his seat in the strange interlude when Don Giovanni warbles on stage streaked in heavy greasepaint and Byrnes’ piercing eyes burn holes in their skulls from across the theater. But there is no time. Everyone is waiting -- they need to  _ leave _ , and Laszlo is so still and calm. Until he isn’t. And then everything happens at once and there is no time for anything anymore except to pray that they survive.

They do.

Thank God, they do.

* * *

The question lingers.  _ What did Sara mean? What had Kreizler said? _

John finds himself on the steps of the East 17th Street house when the calash draws up along the curb, Stevie perched in the seat. It isn’t an unfamiliar sight -- Laszlo is so often coming and going from the Institute, from the prisons and the courtrooms, that more than once John has turned up on his doorstep at the same moment as the man himself. 

“Afternoon, Mister Moore” Stevie flicks his cap in greeting as John dances back down the stairs to greet Laszlo at the carriage door.

John affords him a smile, catching a glimpse of Laszlo half-hidden in shadow as he swings open the calash door. The sight of the alienist is enough to silence the greeting on John’s lips. He seems… pained. Distant and knotted up with his own private thoughts, the narrow mouth drawn tight, a furrow between his eyebrows. It is John who knows him so well -- sees the disturbance that crawls beneath the surface.

“Laszlo?” He offers his hand into the calash, is reassured by the firmness of Laszlo’s grip as he clambers out. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Laszlo insists. Terse. “What are you doing here, John? I was not expecting you.”

“No, no,” John fumbles, following Laszlo into the foyer. “I only meant to drop by -- I can come at another time if you’d prefer?” Something is wrong. Laszlo is too tense, too tightly wound, John fears shattering him with one good blow.

“Stay.” There is something desperate in the brilliant, jasper-bright eyes that John cannot ignore.

Laszlo drifts like a ghost through his own home, John trailing him into the study. The light through the high windows slants in long shafts across the floorboards, catching the curve of Laszlo’s cheek, highlighting the subtle curls in his hair.

“What brought you here?” Laszlo paces before the empty fireplace. Restless. “There is something on your mind, John.”

John falters. Shrugs his shoulders and spreads his hands and says “it’s been some time since we spoke properly. And,” he hesitates. Looks Laszlo up and down with gentle eyes. “After everything that happened, I thought I would look in on you.”

“The case still troubles you, then.”

“I have reason to believe I am not the only one it troubles.” 

John watches as slender fingers climb their way up Laszlo’s wasted forearm, kneading the bones through his sleeve, fingertips digging into the crook of his elbow. He almost misses it -- the brief spasm of the alienist’s thin mouth. 

“Does it hurt?” The question slips out before John can capture it, before he can think to take it back. “You arm -- I never asked.” And he shouldn’t have. A breach of the silent contract of their friendship, of Laszlo’s trust in him...

“John, please.” The furrow of Laszlo’s eyebrows only grows deeper. The words half-anguish.

He has come with questions -- seeking answers to Sara’s cryptic missive.  _ You’ll have to ask him yourself. _

Once the threshold is crossed there can be no turning back. They have always pretended. Subverted. John has made so many allowances. It is a terrible risk to their partnership now, and John hates to do it -- but it is for this partnership of theirs that he presses. Forces himself to dredge up the words.

“Sara said…” And that isn’t at all how he had meant to begin the inquiry. “Well, that is, she implied…”

It flashes like molten gold in Laszlo’s eyes when he turns -- the sunlight slanting across his iris. Hurt. Fury. His face twists. “She told you, then?” Whatever guilt he reads on John’s face, Laszlo scoffs, sneering. “So, now you have come to twist the knife? You wish to hear it for yourself?”

“Laszlo, what --?”

And Laszlo -- composed, inscrutable, imperturbable Laszlo -- explodes. _“Of course it hurts, John!_ _Für die Liebe Gottes!_ It _always_ hurts, and when it doesn’t hurt, the memory of it hurts.” John has seen Laszlo terrible and angry and cruel. Has seen him soft, kind, impossibly gentle. He has never, in all the years he has known him, seen Laszlo like this. Burning and bitter with self-loathing. His voice breaking with anguish. “It is always there and I can never be rid of it.”

“I --” John falters. _ “Laszlo.” _

“You wanted my weakness?” Laszlo seethes, the color rising in his face. Eyes dangerously over-bright. “You and Sara want a turn to puzzle me out and lay my psyche bare? Fair is fair, after all.” He shrugs, venom dripping from every word -- the syllables thickening, colored by the accent normally so carefully managed. “Well, it isn’t hard, John. It’s all  _ right here.”  _

And he lifts his thin, damaged arm as far as he is able. Shakes a weakly bunched fist before him. John wants to take his face into his hands, wants to shout  _ stop it, stop this terrible spectacle. _ But Laszlo crumples, bites down on a ragged cry of pain when he twists the arm too far, wrenches an atrophied tendon out of place.

“Laszlo, enough,” John insists, catching him by the shoulders when he curls around the wounded limb, cradling it close.  _ “Enough. _ What are you  _ talking  _ about?!”

They are all but nose-to-nose, close enought that John can feel the way Laszlo’s whole body stutters to a stop. Finds himself a breath away from those stricken, wide brown eyes.

“What do you mean?”

" Sara told me nothing, Laszlo, except that I should ask you to clarify things myself.” He speaks softly, more softly than he needs to, worry digging deep furrows into his brow. “So that is what I’m doing --  _ asking. _ As your friend. What happened?” And John closes the last breadth of space between them so that they are forehead-to-forehead, his palm cradling the heated curve of Laszlo’s beard-rough cheek. “What is it that’s torn you apart like this?”

The fragile, angry breaths tremble between them.

Ashamed, the dark eyes slide away from John, seeking out the patterns of the floorboards beneath their feet. Silence stretches out between them. John expects to be rebuffed, is sure he will not receive any answer at all.

And then Laszlo says, haltingly, “I am afraid… I am afraid I allowed myself to be too deeply affected by certain elements of Japheth Drury’s case.”

“Laszlo, we were all affected,” John reassures him. “To pretend otherwise would be impossible. Even for you.”

“No.” Laszlo shakes his head. A single, sharp jerk of his chin. “No, it was not just that. I allowed my feelings, my own past, to cloud my judgment. The investigation might have failed because I could not see beyond my own wounds -- because I identified myself within Japheth and his history.”

“How?” The ground beneath them is unsteady now, the road dark and untravelled. And in this, at least, John will be careful -- so careful. “How could you possibly…?” He steers Laszlo by the shoulders, guiding him toward the nearest chair.

“My father,” Laszlo says, whirling away from John. Unable to be still. To breathe. Desperate for an escape. “Was very loving and very cruel. Often in the same breath.” He keeps the compact curve of his back to John, unwilling to look him in  the eye. “And my mother -- perhaps she did not care, or perhaps she herself was too abused to consider protesting.” He shrugs. “It matters little.”

_ I don’t know that Kreizler himself realizes just how damaged he is. _

John’s mind whirls.

“I was never... “ Laszlo swallows hard, the line of his shoulders hitching. “I tried so hard to be the perfect son. But it is human nature to be imperfect, and children -- well. Accidents happen, rules are broken. It is only natural.” And he hates the grief, the shame that swell in his throat to choke him. The hot tears that gather heavy on his eyelashes.

John -- John scarcely breathes. He thinks of his own knickerbocker childhood bathed in sunshine. The days spent runamok with his brother -- doted on, the delight of the society mothers, hardly ever properly punished. 

And Laszlo. What must it have been like? 

His mind’s eye conjures a small, serious boy with Laszlo’s bright eyes and sullen mouth. A curious, wary child absorbed in books and piano lessons. Unwilling to laugh too loudly, to play with too much eagerness -- a silent onlooker, observing the mechanics of the world.

_ Oh, Laszlo. _

“It was such a simple thing.” When he turns, risks a single lingering look toward John, Laszlo’s eyes are glazed, distant. He has disappeared into the past. Into this old, dark memory as he recounts. “Putting me to bed. I was nine years old and, after all this time, I still don’t remember -- were we playing? Was he drunk? Did I protest? How did it  _ happen?” _

“Laszlo...” John’s voice quavers. He aches to reach for Laszlo, to banish the confession from the air between them; to soothe, to protect. But there is no protecting the man from the monsters of the past.

“I should remember it better.” Laszlo scowls, admonishing himself. “I have gone over it again and again in my memory. In my dreams. Being shoved into the wall. Watching the detail of the wallpaper swim before my eyes. I know he shouted at me. But all I hear -- all I can feel -- is my arm wrenched behind my back.” His voice breaks, his whole body drawn tight as a bowstring and trembling with the agony of the words. Even as he speaks, stumbling over the words, the tears begin to fall. “It dislocated my shoulder and fractured all three of the bones in my arm. They were never set properly.”

John swallows the cry that rises in his throat, threatening to choke him.  _ He was more than justified in concealing the truth, John. I will tell you that. I don’t believe what he admitted to me was even half of the extent of it. _

Standing hunched and unmoored before the fireplace, Laszlo seems so lost.

“Fractures with severe trauma to the bone, in small children can… can…” And he chokes on the final pronouncement. Stifles a sob.

For a moment, John is afraid to touch him. The image of broken bones and childhood wounds so sharp and clear at the forefront of his mind. He is sure that if he lays a hand on the alienist now, Laszlo will shatter completely. But he owes that much to Laszlo, some small measure of comfort, at least.

The moment his hand brushes the seam at the shoulder of Laszlo’s jacket, the alienist flinches -- wrenches himself away, snarling like an animal.

“Get out.” The dear, beloved face is pink and twisted with fury, wet with tears. “You know the truth now, John -- get out. I don’t want your  _ pity _ .” 

He couldn’t bear it. Not from John.

And for all that Laszlo is spitting mad, turning all his broken, ragged edges outward in an effort to maim, there is some fragile, crumpled part of him that silently screams  _ please, please, stay. _ Thank God, John sees through him.

Drawing himself up, John says firmly “well I’m glad to hear that, because I don’t have an ounce of pity to accord you, Laszlo.” And again he reaches for Laszlo, drawing him in close. The calluses of his hands scrape through Laszlo’s beard, cradling the damp, wrecked face. John catches the flicker of fear in Laszlo’s eyes, lets him see the tenderness and sorrow writ across his own features. “I ache for the child that you were, for what you endured. I’m angry that it happened. I’m sorry you didn’t think that you could tell me. I hate to see you hurting.”

Laszlo gapes at him. A wayward tear slips from his lashes. John traces its path, smooths the pads of his thumbs across the soft curve of his cheeks.

“But I could never pity you -- you are far too fierce for that.” John risks taking a liberty, smooths his palm over the softness of Laszlo’s hair. Fierce and stubborn and proud, and one of the strongest men John had ever known. “I could only love you.”

There are ghosts in Laszlo Kreizler’s eyes, heavy and haunted things -- but as he absorbs the weight of those wonderful, damning words, some of the agony bleeds from the line of his shoulders. The grief eases from the corners of his mouth.

“Love,” Laszlo whispers, his voice faint, “is not something I expect I deserve.” His good hand -- the left one -- lifts itself slowly, seemingly of its own accord, slender fingers fisting in the starched fabric of John’s shirtfront.

John holds himself still, unwilling to risk even a breath as Laszlo seems to contemplate something his his hollow, distant eyes before the alienist leans in, settling his heavy head against the beating of John’s heart. John folds him close, murmuring into the wisps of Laszlo’s hair “there’s no such thing as deserving it.” He strokes the curve of the alienist’s skull, twining his fingers through soft hair as he sways, rocking them gently from side to side. “There is simply the willingness to give love and receive it.”

Laszlo trembles in his arms -- still dangerously fragile, every other breath still snagging in his chest, almost turning itself into a sob. And John shifts to press a kiss to his temple, cradles the alienist close.

“I went to see him today.” The words are crushed against John’s lapel.

“What?”

“You know my mother died years ago, but my father,” John feels the way the phrase turns Laszlo to stone “he is in an institution not far upstate.”

John presses is face into Laszlo’s hair, breathes in the subtle spice of him. “Why? After what you just told me -- why would you visit him?” He thinks of how drained Laszlo had looked, how small and sad and weary he had seemed, sitting inside the calash. “What can that possibly do but bring you more pain, Laszlo?”

For a moment, Laszlo does not speak.

“Healing, John.” The answer is quiet, but Laszlo’s voice is firm. “It can bring healing. My past is put to rest. And now -- now you know the truth.”


End file.
